


Game Theory

by odoridango



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Extended Metaphors, Gen, Japanese Mythology & Folklore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 06:58:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6185098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kageyama has an odd relationship with dreams.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Game Theory

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally planned to be more angsty and guilt-ridden, but it just didn't turn out that way! Which is fine because that probably could have been too melodramatic. Hope you enjoy!

Kageyama likes dreams. They’re lovely things, bright and glowing, and he used to nurse them as a child, watching the people on the street walk by with their dreams following them like fairy lights. He’d draw patterns in the fading trails, call them to him to watch them bob excitedly about his fingers, and some of them liked to talk, and some of them didn’t. But each of them had something they wanted to show, and he reveled in them then, in being the secret keeper, in being the confidant, in being the one that dreams dared to show themselves to – he treasured the deep reverb of every glimmer of hope and every murmur of cautious glee, he did his best to soothe away the browning edges of anxiety, and the sickly hues of fear.

He loves them still, their dazzling colors and flashbomb intensity, the way they shake him to his core, rattling him to his bones. Dreams are beautiful, dreams are alluring, and they tempt him, reaching to him as much as he reaches to them. The temptation is not just in hope, not just in the high of achievement and victory, or the incandescent sensation of relief and elation, but also in obsession, in the rebound of failure, in the ever-clawing hunger of want and desire. And those feelings, the dark ones, the gnawing ones, the ones he would try to pull away with gentle fingers and the softest words he could manage, those sink into him too, sink into the marrow and the maw of him in the shadowy crevices whose bottom he could never hope to fathom.

Kageyama is no longer a child. He has dreams of his own, but he can never see them. He doesn’t know if they shine and flash like Hinata’s do, like the steady, concentrated beam of a spotlight, unflinching, revealing, but suffused with the unending warmth of yellow and orange hues, ever shifting, ever expanding. Perhaps, if he’s lucky, they’re the evergreens and soft seafoams of Yamaguchi and Yachi’s hopes, the quiet ebb and flow of unfurling leaves and tidal waves, perhaps a little slow but always growing, maturing, building to crash upon the shore or to shoot up to the sky. Maybe they are small and shriveled, fluttering weakly with little to no buoyance, like those of the salarymen who eat at the streetside carts late at night. But Kageyama cannot know, and cannot see. And perhaps he does not deserve to.

Dreams are lovely. And he eats them. He gathers them in his hands, like he did as a child, but a child no more he hungers, he needs the light to fill the emptiness of his belly. He coaxes them to him, keeps them close and warm near his chest, cups them kindly in his hands and opens his mouth wide, slips them down his throat. They are rich and decadent, as one would think wishes, hopes, and aspirations to be, thick almost to the point of choking, with a hint of sweet bitterness that makes him think of the small cups of amazake he drinks every new year’s night with his parents. And the dreams surrender quietly to him; they do not fight to leave his eager stomach or his quiet grip. They simply come to him, and let their light fade away.

He likes nightmares the most. He doesn’t know what that says about him. They are crisp, sharp, not quite pungent but full of spice, and there’s something luxurious in the way he’s able to just breathe them in like smoke, let them sink into his pores, there’s something that makes him feel powerful. But he is always hungry. He is always seeking to fill the void. And while he has some aspect of control, he also knows that this is an untamable part of his nature that he could never tell anyone about. That sometimes when he cannot sleep, he slips out of his window and walks outside, barefoot on the street, drawn to the thunder and lightning crackle of beckoning nightmares and terrors that crack and crunch under the crush of his teeth, the honeyed slide of the dreams right after that help to slake a thirst he is always surprised by.

And it eats at him. It guilts him. He does not know if this desperation fuels the dream-eating, as if devouring something so purely positive and good would help him become so himself, if the terror and horror of nightmares is what seeps from his attempts to smile and pet the neighbor’s cat, if the injustice of consuming wishes is what made it so that he could not help but nibble at the edges of the beautiful prisms and crystals that dangled all around Oikawa, reflecting and casting light in all directions until he sank his eager fingers in to get a closer look, only to leave minute fractures and cracks. He drank, fed, thrived off the nightmares of his middle school teammates, the weight of their fear and despair, and all the while he was unaware that _he_ was the nightmare, that he was the terror. That he is what he eats.

Kageyama is no longer a child. He knows this, because he knows what he did not before; he knows as he ate away the nightmares he summoned them in the form of himself, and his teammates replaced them, replaced him, with newer dreams, the bubbling foam of better hopes edged in simmering black bitterness, and he still catches himself thinking about the hunger that plagued him day and night, kept him awake under the covers, sent him walking miles about his neighborhood gorging himself all night, only to wake empty, with the hunger burning him alive from the inside.

But this is part of him. This is his nature. He is Kageyama Tobio, and Kageyama Tobio eats dreams alive, whether he wants to or not. Sugawara-senpai’s dreams are cool and lancing on his tongue, so warm and sweet, and with his mouth he says, _I won’t lose to you_ , and licks the lingering hints of spice from the corner of his lips. _Thank you_ , he says to Yachi, and savors the thick cloud of her anxiety, swirling it about on his tongue. _I’ll take you to the top_ , he says to Hinata over and over, whose fears are just as bright, if not brighter, than his dreams, and they pop and fizz like ramune as Kageyama tears them to pieces, feasts himself on the excess of hope and goodwill that Hinata always seems to produce.

“You eat like a pig,” Tsukishima says with distaste, early in the morning at training camp. Tsukishima, whose pointed insults are always so annoying, his golden edged fear and loathing so thick and cloying that it always sends Kageyama reeling, sticky and viscous enough that it he can taste its tartness lining his mouth for hours afterwards.

“I eat when I’m hungry,” Kageyama replies shortly, eating another piece of glazed salmon, running his tongue along the backs of his teeth, where remnants of Yamaguchi’s uneasy dreams cling. He looks Tsukishima in the eye, traces the emerging glimmers of a shy dream beginning to cluster around the flyaway tips of his fine, golden hair, and wonders idly if that’s a dream that’s meant for him too.

Last night he’d sat up next to the windowsill where the moonlight couldn’t reach him, and feasted. In Karasuno, he never lacks anything to eat; some dreams like to talk and some don’t but they all want to be shared, and nightmares and fears want to spread more than anything else. And he’s a team member, he’s a part of their murder, and that makes them more susceptible. The minute they fall asleep he’s swarmed by their light and their shadow, but if there’s anything he’s learned in his time as a nightmare, as a dream-eater, it’s that he can only eat the nightmares and dreams that people want him to eat. They have to call him, they have to want him, they have to need him. It makes him hungrier than ever for the wishes and fears that rush to him when they’re unguarded, and Karasuno’s dreams are the most exquisite meal he’s ever had. He can’t stop biting and licking his lips in the daytime, thinking of the electric boldness of Nishinoya’s frustration, and the subtle depth of Daichi’s hidden apprehensions.

He wonders if it’s alright to be like this, to glut himself on their thoughts, and simultaneously feel ridiculously privileged for the banquet. He wants them closer. He wants to savor drop, linger over every fear and every wish, untangle the riotous parts of them he can’t understand during the day. He wants them to come to him. He wants them to call his name.

“If anything, Tsukishima, you should eat more! You’re an athlete aren’t you?” chides Sugawara, giving Tsukishima an extra onigiri from his own plate.

As Tsukishima scowls, the glow about him pulses, and a small, reaching bubble floats to Kageyama’s finger. Kageyama closes his eyes and licks off the grain, citrus bursting on his tongue, and he runs his teeth over his lower lip, yearning. He hungers, for the dreams to come, and the dreams that might be. 

**Author's Note:**

> For clarification - the concept is that Kageyama is a baku, in the loosest form. Baku eat nightmares, but if they're really hungry, they can end up eating good dreams too. They can be called upon or evoked, I think usually by children, to eat a person's nightmare before it comes to them in sleep, or afterwards. 
> 
> I'm definitely interested in concrit if you have it, and thoughts about the concept!


End file.
